Intel Delivers Core

By Jessica Davis -- Electronic News, 6/26/2006

Intel today is shipping the first processor that implements its new Core microachitecture – the technology that the chip giant has promised will deliver better performance and greater power efficiency.

The shipment of the Xeon 5100 dual-core processor, previously code-named “Woodcrest” is Intel’s answer to its processor rival, Advanced Micro Devices’ market momentum, particularly in server x86 space. Intel announced the new chip at a press conference in San Francisco today.

While Intel has been promoting Woodcrest for years, and discussing its new Core microarchitecture for months, the prospect of the new chip has not seemed to put a dent in AMD’s momentum.  But Intel executives speaking at the press conference today said that was about to change.

“Up until this point all we had was test systems in play,” said Tom Kilroy, co-general manager of Intel’s Digital Enterprise Group, during a question and answer session after the formal presentation. “Today is the first day one when we are shipping…I’m very confident the orders start today. We’ve got a number of examples across the board.”

Intel offered testimonials from executives at Pixar and BMW during the formal presentation about how their corporations will use the Core microarchitecture.

Intel said that currently more than 200 server and workstation models are planned from more than 150 manufacturers. The new Intel chip is aimed at the high-volume server, workstation, communications, storage and embedded market segments, Intel said..  

Intel offered a raft of benchmark data about the new chip and concluded that Woodcrest delivers up to 135 percent performance improvements and up to 40 percent reduction in energy consumption over previous Intel server products. 

The design uses Intel’s 65-nanometer manufacturing process that further shrinks transistors and power consumption, Intel said. And the 5100 series processor is “drop-in compatible” as part of Intel’s Bensley platform and available across a variety of server product segments, Intel said. The Bensley platform offers FB-DIMMs, Intel Virtualization Technology, Intel Active Server Manager and Intel I/O Acceleration Technology.

Intel will ship the 5100 series at frequencies up to 3.0 gigahertz speed and faster 1333 megahertz front side bus and 4 megabytes of shared L2 cache or memory reservoir between both cores. The 3 GHz version will ship with a Thermal Design Point (TDP) of 80 watts with all others rated at just 65W. An even lower voltage version will ship in the third quarter at 2.33 GHz and a TDP of just 40 watts. Woodcrest includes power management techniques that drive substantially lower actual or measured at the wall power than the maximum or TDP power.